Monday, 18 March 2013

Press finds its balls

In December 2012 Fraser Nelson set the ball rolling by committing the Speccie not to co-operate in any Parliamentary regulation of the press. The Guardian - torn between its desire to support the luvvies wing of Common Purpose and remembering that it, too, is supposed to be a newspaper - reports that the Sun, Telegraph and Mail may all boycott Parliamentary regulation. Meanwhile all devote much column ink to defend the freedom of the press, and none more effectively so than the Sun, which manages to include not only quotes from both Churchill and Hitler but Ralph Miliband. The Sun's editorial is a delight:

IT is the year 2024.

Ten years after the 2014 Regulation of the Press Act, MPs are fiddling expenses on an industrial scale. But Sun readers have no right to know.

Our Boys are fighting another war with shoddy kit while their families live in squalor on MoD bases. But Sun readers have no right to know.

Indeed in 2024 you know nothing of any Government failings or the personal activities of MPs, peers, judges, celebrities or sport stars.

Such stories fall foul of Privacy Czar Lord Grant, the Labour Peer once known as Hacked Off Hugh, who can veto them under draconian amendments to the 2014 Act which ended 300 years of Press freedom.

Please.Is it so amazing that if you give someone ammunition they will then use it against you ?Free to sneak about breaking laws as necessary to get a "story" (in the real world the press is not free, it is owned by the rich and powerful who use it for their own ends).

Anon: Nobody is free to break laws. It was the News of the World thinking that it was that led to its downfall.

“The rich and powerful”? As opposed to whom? Hugh Grant? Max Mosley? Lord Leveson? The Prime Minister? Lord Sainsbury? The Dowler case - and it is very much a criminal case, investigated by the police and prosecuted by the CPS - is an excuse, a tool for the rich and powerful to get control of all communications media, not just a few big papers.